It stands to reason that a good many people had noticed Muhlen on the
morning of his disappearance. One cannot walk about Nepenthe at that
hour of the day without being seen, and Muhlen was sufficiently
conspicuous. But everyone knew what was in store for him if he admitted
such a fact, to wit, an application of paragraph 43 of the 92nd section
of the Code of Criminal Procedure, according to which any and every
witness of this kind is liable to be segregated from his family and
kept under arrest for an indefinite length of time, pending the
instruction of a trial which might take half a century. Nobody,
therefore, was fool enough to admit having encountered him--nobody save
a half-witted youth who fatuously confided to a policeman that the had
met the gentleman somewhere in the neighbourhood of the bibliographer's
villa about the hour of midday. Under ordinary circumstances Signor
Malipizzo would have been delighted to lay sacrilegious hands on Mr.
Eames, whose Olympic aloofness had always annoyed him and against whom
a case could now be got up, on the strength of these indications.
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